Mooquackwooftweetmeow

Concatenating zoölogical onomatopœia since 1999

About Mooquackwooftweetmeow

Hi! This is Mooquackwooftweetmeow, a collection of stuff by Greg K Nicholson.

Entries written in February 2004

  1. RSSification 2RSS (http://www.2rss.com/) has a nice converteriser which outputs any Atom feed (such as this one - wink, wink) as RSS, available at http://www.2rss.com/software.php?page=atom2rss So now even if your newsreader isn't Atom-enabled you can still read this weblog; now you've got no excuse.
  2. Lulu If you were expecting an entry about a singer, or a female pet or something, you'll be disappointed. I've been having problems with the L and U keys on my (fancy, wireless) keyboard. Turns out the keys can be popped off; after a few minutes fiddling with the pseudo-rubber doings inside, and performing a transplant between L and Esc, all keys now work fine ...as you can probably guess from the fact that I've typed this.
  3. Winwall I had been using Microsoft's Wallpaper Powertoy to rotate my desktop backgrounds; I now use Winwall (http://net-session.com/winwall/). The biggest limitation of Microsoft's Powertoy is that it only recognises GIF (boo!), JPEG and BMP images - i.e. not PNGs. Winwall, however, recognises all four formats (and probably more), and its automatic resizing looks much nicer. The program is closed source, but freeware.
  4. Pluto Isn't a Planet Officially, Pluto is a planet. In reality, it's a member of numerous Kuiper Belt objects which orbit the Sun beyond Neptune. When it was found, 74 years ago, Clyde Tombaugh was searching for a planet and so assumed what he had found was one.
  5. Moo­quack­woof­tweet­meow's Going Nowhere I now have my own PURL top-level domain. What in the heck is a PURL top-level domain? PURL stands for Persistant Uniform Resource Locator - an URL is just a normal web address. A PURL is simply a redirect, designed so that it persists indefinitely; I can change what purl.org/mooquackwooftweetmeow/ points to, but the PURL itself never changes. This means that if I ever move to another webhost (which I don't expect to happen very soon), I can point purl.org/mooquackwooftweetmeow/ there instead. This weblog can be found at http://purl.org/mooquackwooftweetmeow/weblog, but unfortunately KlipFolio doesn't understand HTTP redirects. Bugger.
  6. Klipfolio + Atom = 1/2 OK, I can't embed an Atom feed in a Klip, but you can view Atom feeds using Klipfolio. Its Feed Reader Klip (http://www.klipfarm.com/farm.php?page=info&klip=916) accepts Atom as well as RSS 2.0 and RDF (RSS 1.0).
  7. Isn't XML wonderful? Despite an hour of valiant effort, I've been unable to convince Gecko to render XHTML embedded in an Atom feed. I've tried encoding the arrow brackets, various namespace trickery... to no avail. So you're gonna have to put up with plain text URLs, until someone can show me how it's done... anybody?
  8. No Knoppix The 2004-02-09 version of Knoppix (http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/) doesn't seem to want to play nice with my computer. It's probably something to do with Nero's burning of the CD; if it's as good as its proofreading, I've got no chance. A couple of days ago, when writing over a CD-RW, Nero kindly warned me that I might loose some data. Yes, loose, not lose. As in My shirt is quite loose., Did you lose weight?.
  9. Namespaces are fairly fun The Feed Validator (http://feedvalidator.org) gave me a thumbs-down :( Entries' IDs have to be valid URLs, you see, and I'd been using them as arbitrary labels. I'd also been leeching off these arbitrary labels in order to create anchors in the XHTML representation of the feed; those using a web browser can check they work by clicking this item's title; those using a news aggregator can visit the alternate link; in both cases, the item's title should be at the very top of the browser window.
  10. Wow! Internet Explorer can even mangle XML! Here's me thinking Internet Explorer wouldn't display this feed properly! Obviously, it doesn't... but it at least has a go at mangling it, leaving this text (and this) legible. You do get a nice piece of HTML above the title, however.
  11. Freewebs aren't very good at MIME types... part II Sorta got side-tracked there... Anyway, to get around the incorrect MIME type problem (which made Gecko refuse to play ball), I've tagged .xml onto the end of the weblog's files; hopefully that'll satisfy most browsers.
  12. Freewebs aren't very good at MIME types Freewebs is obviously designed to cater for webmasters who've never heard of Jeffrey Zeldman... Like most, if not all, free web hosts, Freewebs use filename extensions to determine what MIME type to serve for a file; this is OK, until they get it wrong. Granted, Atom and XSL aren't the most commonly used file formats on the web but nonetheless Freewebs could bother serving them with the proper MIME types.
  13. Klipfolio + Atom = 0 Well! It seems that one can't (easily) use an atom feed as klipfood :/ By easily I mean I can't just point it towards the URL and have it automagically work, like it does for RSS. Eh, well... I'm gonna hold the klip back until I can get it assimilating this feed; at the moment it's just a rehash of the RSS feed, intermingled with The Twaddle's RSS feed.
  14. Copy and paste... By the way, those URLs in the previous post are just plain text; unless your browser parses plain text URLs, you're just gonna have to copy and paste them for now - I'm not an XML expert and the prospect of digging about trying to force Atom and XHTML to work together to produce links, isn't appealing... maybe later.
  15. Hurrah once more! That w3schools (http://www.w3schools.com/) is pretty decent. I've now concocted an XSL stylesheet for this feed, so visiting its URL in a (good) web browser should display it as a nice page.
  16. Hurrah! Well, then... this is an atom weblog. Why's it only in atom format? Everything on Mooquackwooftweetmeow is done the old-fashioned way - using the human brain, a plain-text editor, and no PHP, ASP, SQL or any other fanciness. And I don't want to have to copy every entry out into an XHTML page. I'm thinking of having a bash at some XSLT, to automatically generate a fancy front for the weblog; I tried it with the RSS feed, but didn't quite manage it satisfactorily; perhaps my standards are just too high (after all, I am using a free web host).
  17. Take Back the Web This is the bit where I talk about Mozilla Firefox for a while
  18. It's Still Not A Tree The website formerly known as This Wasn't A Tree

About these entries

These entries are pretty old—beware of parachronisms.